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Kurt Laitner

Stanford scientists put free text-analysis tool on the web | Engineering - 1 views

  •  
    Perhaps useful tool
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Action (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) - 0 views

  • intentionally
  • questions about the nature, variety, and identity of action
  • Should we think of the consequences, conventional or causal, of physical behavior as constituents of an action distinct from but ‘generated by’ the movement? Or should we think that there is a single action describable in a host of ways?
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  • Donald Davidson
  • an action
  • is something an agent does that was ‘intentional under some description,’
  • there have been many attempts to map the relations between intentions for the future, acting intentionally, and acting with a certain intention.
  • There has been a notable or notorious debate about whether the agent's reasons in acting are causes of the action
  • rendered the action intelligible in his eyes
  • things that merely happen
  • things they genuinely do
  • distinction between
  • the doings, are the acts or actions of the agent
  • what distinguishes an action from a mere happening or occurrence?
  • An agent performs activity that is directed at a goal
  • adopted on the basis of an overall practical assessment of his options and opportunities
  • awareness
  • that he is performing the activity
  • and that the activity is aimed by him at such-and-such a chosen end
  • It is frequently noted that the agent has some sort of immediate awareness of his physical activity and of the goals that the activity is aimed at realizing.
  • ‘knowledge without observation.’
  • It is also important to the concept of ‘goal directed action’ that agents normally implement a kind of direct control or guidance over their own behavior.
  • For many years, the most intensely debated topic in the philosophy of action concerned the explanation of intentional actions in terms of the agent's reasons for acting
  • Davidson and other action theorists defended the position that reason explanations are causal explanations
  • In the foregoing, reference has been made to explanations of actions in terms of reasons, but recent work on agency has questioned whether contemporary frameworks for the philosophy of action have really articulated the way in which an agent's desires and other pro-attitudes have the distinctive force of reasons in the setting of these ordinary explanations
Francois Bergeron

A model for device development | Researchers at the Stanford University Program in Biodesign have completed a one-year study that examined how medical technology is brought to market | Sept 2008 - 2 views

  • clinical need.
  • estimated market size and clinical impact associated with each.
  • prior art related
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  • barriers to further development exist from an intellectual property perspective
  • Inventors must also determine if they are in a position to efficiently seize the market opportunity.
  • regulatory considerations, reimbursement strategies, intellectual property, and business development objectives. This leads to Phase I of the development model.
  • R&D in Phase II is responsible for generating early concepts. Brainstorming sessions are often held during this stage of development with members of R&D, marketing, and physician consultants. Computational analyses, such as stress and flow studies, are conducted to further understand the behavior of a proposed device. The team often develops a 3D CAD model of a proposed device
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    medical device development steps
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

WebProtégé - 3 views

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    I am using Protege to build a living systems ontology applied to SNESORICA. This ontology will constitute the backbone of value networks'infrastructure, modeled as living systems. If you want to contribute to the elaboration of this ontology please contact me, this web application is collaborative. I am also using it to build our Projects ontology. If you want to contribute to the elaboration of this ontology please contact me, this web application is collaborative.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

What is an ontology and why we need it - 1 views

  • an ontology designer makes these decisions based on the structural properties of a class.
  • an ontology is a formal explicit description of concepts in a domain of discourse (classes (sometimes called concepts)), properties of each concept describing various features and attributes of the concept (slots (sometimes called roles or properties)), and restrictions on slots (facets (sometimes called role restrictions)). An ontology together with a set of individual instances of classes constitutes a knowledge base. In reality, there is a fine line where the ontology ends and the knowledge base begins.
  • Classes describe concepts in the domain
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  • A class can have subclasses that represent concepts that are more specific than the superclass.
  • Here we discuss general issues to consider and offer one possible process for developing an ontology. We describe an iterative approach to ontology development: we start with a rough first pass at the ontology. We then revise and refine the evolving ontology and fill in the details. Along the way, we discuss the modeling decisions that a designer needs to make, as well as the pros, cons, and implications of different solutions.
  • In practical terms, developing an ontology includes: �         defining classes in the ontology, �         arranging the classes in a taxonomic (subclass–superclass) hierarchy, �         defining slots and describing allowed values for these slots, �         filling in the values for slots for instances.
  • We can then create a knowledge base by defining individual instances of these classes filling in specific slot value information and additional slot restrictions.
  • Slots describe properties of classes and instances:
  • some fundamental rules in ontology design
  • There is no one correct way to model a domain— there are always viable alternatives. The best solution almost always depends on the application that you have in mind and the extensions that you anticipate. 2)      Ontology development is necessarily an iterative process. 3)      Concepts in the ontology should be close to objects (physical or logical) and relationships in your domain of interest. These are most likely to be nouns (objects) or verbs (relationships) in sentences that describe your domain.
  • how detailed or general the ontology is going to be
  • what we are going to use the ontology for
  • concepts in the ontology must reflect this reality
  • We suggest starting the development of an ontology by defining its domain and scope. That is, answer several basic questions: �         What is the domain that the ontology will cover? �         For what  we are going to use the ontology? �         For what types of questions the information in the ontology should provide answers? �         Who will use and maintain the ontology?
  • plan to use
  • domain
  • If the people who will maintain the ontology describe the domain in a language that is different from the language of the ontology users, we may need to provide the mapping between the languages.
  • One of the ways to determine the scope of the ontology is to sketch a list of questions that a knowledge base based on the ontology should be able to answer, competency questions
  • These competency questions are just a sketch and do not need to be exhaustive.
Kurt Laitner

Inequality: Why egalitarian societies died out - opinion - 30 July 2012 - New Scientist - 0 views

  • FOR 5000 years, humans have grown accustomed to living in societies dominated by the privileged few. But it wasn't always this way. For tens of thousands of years, egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies were widespread. And as a large body of anthropological research shows, long before we organised ourselves into hierarchies of wealth, social status and power, these groups rigorously enforced norms that prevented any individual or group from acquiring more status, authority or resources than others.*
  • How, then, did we arrive in the age of institutionalised inequality? That has been debated for centuries. Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau reasoned in 1754 that inequality was rooted in the introduction of private property. In the mid-19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels focused on capitalism and its relation to class struggle. By the late 19th century, social Darwinists claimed that a society split along class lines reflected the natural order of things - as British philosopher Herbert Spencer put it, "the survival of the fittest". (Even into the 1980s there were some anthropologists who held this to be true - arguing that dictators' success was purely Darwinian, providing estimates of the large numbers of offspring sired by the rulers of various despotic societies as support.)
  • But by the mid-20th century a new theory began to dominate. Anthropologists including Julian Steward, Leslie White and Robert Carneiro offered slightly different versions of the following story: population growth meant we needed more food, so we turned to agriculture, which led to surplus and the need for managers and specialised roles, which in turn led to corresponding social classes.
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  • One line of reasoning suggests that self-aggrandising individuals who lived in lands of plenty ascended the social ranks by exploiting their surplus - first through feasts or gift-giving, and later by outright dominance
  • At the group level, argue anthropologists Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, improved coordination and division of labour allowed more complex societies to outcompete the simpler, more equal societies
  • From a mechanistic perspective, others argued that once inequality took hold - as when uneven resource-distribution benefited one family more than others - it simply became ever more entrenched. The advent of agriculture and trade resulted in private property, inheritance, and larger trade networks, which perpetuated and compounded economic advantages.
  • Many theories about the spread of stratified society begin with the idea that inequality is somehow a beneficial cultural trait that imparts efficiencies, motivates innovation and increases the likelihood of survival. But what if the opposite were true?
  • In a demographic simulation that Omkar Deshpande, Marcus Feldman and I conducted at Stanford University, California, we found that, rather than imparting advantages to the group, unequal access to resources is inherently destabilising and greatly raises the chance of group extinction in stable environments.
  • Counterintuitively, the fact that inequality was so destabilising caused these societies to spread by creating an incentive to migrate in search of further resources. The rules in our simulation did not allow for migration to already-occupied locations, but it was clear that this would have happened in the real world, leading to conquests of the more stable egalitarian societies - exactly what we see as we look back in history.
  • In other words, inequality did not spread from group to group because it is an inherently better system for survival, but because it creates demographic instability, which drives migration and conflict and leads to the cultural - or physical - extinction of egalitarian societies.
  • Egalitarian societies may have fostered selection on a group level for cooperation, altruism and low fertility (which leads to a more stable population), while inequality might exacerbate selection on an individual level for high fertility, competition, aggression, social climbing and other selfish traits.
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